As I receive contracts and final edits from authors, I’ll post a teaser from their story here and on our Facebook page. You know where to get the rest, right? Comments are welcome.
A Feast of Kings
By
David Sklar
She always slept on a bed of nails, but the night she took me home with her she had to be on top, and her gyrations ripped the flesh from my back. The candlelight showed wrinkles that I could not see by day, and I reached up to breasts that had looked firm when she was dressed but now hung over me like the Gardens of Babylon, withered pendula swinging through broad ovals as her face contorted above the noise of the two of us together.
I dreamt of bones in the desert, of sand beneath the sun.
In the morning I woke to the car horns of lower Manhattan, and she brought me breakfast in bed. The pins sank deeper into my bottom as I sat up. From a bowl of unglazed clay she fed me a dish that was both meat and mead, lifting morsels between her thumb and first two fingers to my mouth. Her cats prowled satellite paths around us, their hungry orbits tightening with each loop.
So, why did we take this story? There is power in this voice and skill in the telling. That aside, it’s a fascinating story of an epic power struggle through eternity and/or madness in Manhattan. I was a fan from the first read and two editors came aboard soon thereafter. The original was 1750 words; final edit is 1700 words.
Tune in tomorrow for our next tease. The full Table of Contents is here.
